Everything You Need To Know About ‘Ingobernable’s’ Haunting Theme Song (Including Its Translated Lyrics)

In Ingobernable —which translates to “Ungovernable”— Mexican telenovela superstar Kate del Castillo plays a beleaguered First Lady of Mexico who makes a run for it after scandal engulfs her husband’s administration. The Netflix Original gives del Castillo a chance to return to form — she shot to fame playing a powerful female drug lord in La Reina del Sur — while winking a little bit at her own real life penchant for international scandal. del Castillo became an international news item because of her friendly relationship with notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The two became friends in real life after del Castillo tweeted compliments in his direction. At one point she was going to work with El Chapo to produce a film about his life and del Castillo was the person responsible for brokering Sean Penn’s controversial interview with the criminal. When the cartel lord was eventually captured, DVDs of La Reina del Sur were found in his safe house (so we know what he was binge-watching).

Like a lot of Netflix’s foreign language originals, Ingobernable comes with multiple audio and visual translations so that non-Spanish speakers can get lost in the drama, and yet, there are no subtitles for the show’s haunting title song, “Me verás.” The song, which is written and performed by Grammy Award-winning Mexican-American band La Santa Cecilia, uses a series of loose, yet rather heavy, metaphors to evoke an ominous mood — and to link the themes of betrayal with that of the feminine. So, it’s, you know, the perfect song for a Kate del Castillo show about dangerous women and high-stakes games of betrayal.

Here’s a deep dive from Decider’s very own translator, Rómulo Bevliacqua:

The following is a translation from Spanish to English of the song “Me verás” by La Santa Cecilia. Because the lyrics are not narrative and leave abundant room for interpretation I have provided two versions of the translation. The first is an interpretive translation that gives a sense of the mood conveyed by the original but doesn’t try to preserve the original’s (loose) rhyme scheme. The second is a literal translation that may be useful to the editor in judging the quality and fidelity of the stylized translation.

I was not able to find an official version of these lyrics on the internet, so I transcribed the Spanish original by ear. That said, I did find several unofficial versions of the lyrics online, and they agreed with my transcription in all material aspects.

[1] Some of the wordplay of the original is lost here. “Traición” can mean “treason” or, more commonly, “betrayal.” This ambiguity works with the plot of the show, but doesn’t have an equivalent expression in English. I’ve chosen to resolve the translator’s dilemma in favor of “betrayal” because betrayal embodied as a woman is a much more accessible image (perhaps even an established allegory) than treason against the state embodied as a woman.

[2]The meaning of this line in the original is disputable. It is very close to the idiom “caiga por su propio peso”—literally,” to fall under its own weight”—but is off by a preposition (“a” instead of “por”). Added to this is the fact that this idiom is commonly misused. Under its dictionary definition, this idiom expresses that a proposition is plainly evident or too obvious to need explanation. Nevertheless, and likely because of the connotations of “to fall,” it is often used to mean the opposite: that a given proposition fails for reasons that are too obvious to need explanation. In short, the phrase, in common speech, might mean “self-evidently true” or “self-evidently false.” In my estimation, the lyrics do not provide sufficient context to decide this question, so I’ve fudged it.